Blog #3
In high school I felt I had a love hate relationship with textbooks. On the one hand it was nice because I had the resource for my class at my fingertips, but on the other hand it was boring. So boring. I found this chapter very intriguing because it gave some great examples on how to use the textbook better as a teacher, but also some other resources to use in place of the textbook. One thing that really caught my attention was that this book recommends for teachers to be “vigilant” (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, p. 201) in looking for other textbooks for your class. I think this would be such a great idea because I can remember many of my teachers growing up saying “I really don’t like how the textbook presents this topic” but we would sometimes still have to use the textbook because it was required of them to do so.
I
personally think that having multiple/ other resources teachers can avoid this problem
and help the students learn material in the best way possible. One of my questions
about finding other textbooks is how can this be done by not upsetting the
department head/ other colleagues? Because my thought process on it is if the
school/county is spending all this money for students to have this one textbook
for my course and I decide not to use it then I assume my department head or supervisor will not be too pleased with my decision, which in turn will make
for an awkward school year. But maybe I am wrong and whoever is above me will
be okay with my looking into and using other textbooks other than the one
assigned. So how do I find a happy medium in this case?
Word Count: 296
I really enjoyed reading your blog because you bring up many questions that I also had while reading the text. I think that so much of educating a classroom of students is done by knowing your students—their strengths, their weaknesses, their likes, their dislikes. All of this information will guide you in what resources to use and what areas to focus in on. Can a teacher have the best interest of her students while still satisfying the expectations of the department head? This chapter reminded me that teaching is not only working with students, but also working with administrators. It will be a challenge as a teacher to use differentiated instruction while also have certain instructions given by administrators.
ReplyDeleteWord count: 120